--- In cybalist@..., "Piotr Gasiorowski" <gpiotr@...> wrote:
> From: "tgpedersen" <tgpedersen@...>
> Date: Fri Mar 15, 2002 10:26 am
> Subject: Re: Daci
>
> > ... 2) an acquaintance of mine, who was once married to a Polish
woman and claims he speaks Polish, said this happened in Polish too
(but then he says many other extraordinary things; he used to be a
chemical engineer working with various wood-impregnating materials,
containning, among other things, mercury, which reminds me that since
lithium is a di-valent metallic element, as are lead and mercury, and
not used for any biological compound in living creatures, perhaps it
works by replacing those heavy metals in organic, amino-acid-based
compounds, but this was a digression...).
>
> The existence of the construction in some northern dialects of
Russian is a well-known fact, but your friend misinformed you about
Polish. (By the way, whatever the digression is about, lithium, being
one of the alkali metals, is monovalent.
Oops, gaffe. Attempt at last-second save: Mercury comes in both Hg+
and Hg++, both equally toxic)
>
> > The point I was trying to make, some sentences back, is that such
constructions may "hide" in the language. You ask native speakers of
the language: "In your language, do you say so-and-so?". "No", they
say. But they do. It may even surface first time in poetry, contrary
to your argument against the early appearance of a "do" construction
in English.
>
> All right, if a native speaker's word means anything, we ain't got
no articles in Polish, and very certainly no postfixed articles. Not
even hidden ones. And please don't tell me that that's what native
speakers always say, unless you can prove me wrong empirically.
You must have misread what I wrote. Of course I believe you. But in
general: if you ask non-linguist speakers of a language about a sub-
standard form of their language, chances are they deny it exists. 40
years ago, what would an English-speaker answer if you asked
whether "I is" was acceptable in any type of English speech?
>
> > ... Now to the application: Obviously the late appearance in the
Balkan languages of suffixed articles can't be used as an argument
that it wasn't used in the spoken language. Imagine the experiment
that all we knew of 21st century Russian was a collection of various
laws. Would we conclude from them that Russian had a suffixed
article -ot, -ta, -to? Not very likely, I'd say.
>
> What we can state with any degree of plausibility is that
Bulgaro/Macedonian Slavic (plus some Serbian dialects) developed the
inherited noun + enclitic pronoun syntagm (originally a marginal
construction) into a system of obligatory definiteness-markers, which
co-evolved with a similar system in Romanian (+ Albanian) and was
perhaps inspired by the latter. We can date, roughly, the emergence
of the the full-fledged system. It's easy to speculate that the
system might derive from Dacian, since Dacian is dead and the Dacians
can't protest. However, to quote Wittgenstein, "Wovon man nicht
sprechen kann, darüber muß man schweigen".
And if Wittgenstein had stuck to that, he wouldn't have written
anything after the "Tractatus". And as for the Dacians being dead and
gone, yes, alas, that is true and the fate of us all. If that were
not so, we would have need for the speculations of historical
lingustics, we could just ask Cicero himself. As a matter of fact,
most of the peoples to which we ascribe this or that turn of phrase
are dead and gone. It really is very sad.
But a general remark: It seems to me you often use the argument that
since we can't conclude on linguistic grounds that something has
happened, then it would be unscientific to assume it did, and
therefore it didn't happen, also given pertinent extra-linguistic
evidence that it might have happened. Case in point: the possible
identity of the Getae and the Goths. (Trying to represent your
position:) If they spoke dissimilar languages we cannot entertain the
possibility that they might have been the same people (wholy or
partly) and therefore Jordanes is definitely wrong if he claims they
were.
>
> > And as to Greek: Didn't already Classical Greek have a prefixed
independent (*so, *sa, *tod) based definite article?
>
> So what?
So Greek did not have to invent an article, which, according to your
theory of coincidences, could have fallen on either side of the NP;
since they already had one that worked to everyone's satisfaction.
Albanian also has a "free" article that precedes some nouns and
substantivised adjectives.
So do the North Germanic languages.
What was once "pre-" may easily become "post-" (witness East
Scandinavian articles).
You mean North Germanic outside of West Jutland, I suppose? Correct,
if you think that the suffixed article started with -inn.
Such shifts are common in contact situations.
Out of curiosity: Contact between what and what?
>
> > As for your argument that Albanian would have lost inherited
suffixed definiteness because of upheavals in the morphology; yes, I
understand your point, but I think you put the cart before the horse:
A language will not let the morphology of a form deteriorate, unless
the language has decided (pardon the metaphor) that that form is
superfluous.
>
> The functionalist claim that a language will not
permit "indispensable" morphemes to undergo phonological erosion is
empirically falsified by numerous cases in which a
theoretically "undesirable" change does occur. How would you
determine, as a linguist, which elements are really superfluous (or,
for that matter, which are indispensable and cannot be lost)? If you
argue a posteriori that "X must have been superfluous because it
disappeared", the argument becomes a circular pseudo-explanation.
If you can't determine, as a linguist, which elements are really
superfluous, how would you determine what is
theoretically "undesirable"?
>
> Grammatical categories are often lost or merged (together with
their functions) without any kind of compensation (think of
grammatical gender in English, or the optative in NW Germanic, or the
dual in language after language).
As for gender disappearing, a few facts. In Dutch and in the East
North Germanic languages genders have been reduced to two: common and
neuter. In West Jutland genders have been reduced further to one, as
in English. But in parts of Jutland, there is a transitional
situation: grammatiacal gender has been replaced by functional
gender: common gender is used for countables <den hus>, neuter for
non-countables. Thus also partly in standard Danish: <den oel> "that
(bottle of) beer" vs <det oel> "that beer" (eg. spilled on the
table). In other words: Since the division masculine/feminine was
useless, it could be given up, but between speakers of various
Germanic dialects, parts of the distinction common/neuter could be
put to sensible use (eg the articles <den> vs. <det>) and therefore
did not disappear. In a situation where a non-Germanic substrate or
superstrate language was involved, the whole system collapsed, since
they would have clue as to what should be grammatically common and
what neuter gender, based on Germanic.
Sound change is not blocked just because it eats up the morphology.
Phonetic reduction very often destroys inflections, and people learn
to live without them. Most case forms fell together in Old Albanian
(so that now singular nouns have only two cases, the nom.-acc. and
the dat.-gen.-abl.) and the speakers did not protest. Why should they
have opposed the loss of postfixed articles rather than let the
phonology do its damnedest and see what happened?
>
> Piotr
You make phonological change sound like a kind of weathering, doing
things to people's language which they are powerless to control. I
don't believe that.
Torsten